The manner in which Nijinsky’s
face changes from role to role is immediately striking. It is
enhanced by makeup, but not created by it. In fact, a friend pointed
out that the only role in which one recognizes Nijinsky’s
civilian face is that of Petrouchka, where he is most heavily
made up. There is no mystery about such transformability. People
don’t usually realize how much any face changes in the course
of a day, and how often it is unrecognizable for an instant or
two. Nijinsky seems to have controlled the variability a face
has. The same metamorphosis is obvious in his body. The Specter,
for instance, has no age or sex, the Faun is adolescent, and the
hero of Jeux has a body full-grown and experienced. Tyl can either
be boy or man. The Slave in Schéhérazade is fat,
the Spector is thin. It does not look like the same body. One
can say that in this sense there is no exhibitionism in Nijinsky’s
photographs. He is never showing you himself, or an interpretation
of himself. He is never vain of what he is showing you. The audience
does not see him as a professional dancer, or as a professional
charmer. He disappears completely, and instead there is an imaginary
being in his place. Like a classic artist, he remains detached,
unseen, unmoved, uninterested. Looking at him, one is in an imaginary
world, entire and very clear; and one’s emotions are not
directed at their material objects, but at their imaginary satisfactions.
As he said himself, he danced with love.

To sum up, Nijinsky in his photographs
shows us the style of a classic artist. The emotion he projects,
the character he projects, is not communicated as his own, but
as one that exists independently of himself, in the objective
world. Similarly his plastic sense suggests neither a private
yearning into an infinity of space nor a private shutting out
of surrounding relationships, both of them legitimate romantic
attitudes. The weight he gives his own body, the center which
he gives his plastic motions, strikes a balance with the urge
and rapidity of leaps and displacements. It strikes a balance
between the role he dances and the roles of his partners. The
distinction of place makes the space look real, the distinction
of persons makes the drama real. And for the sake of this clarification
he characterizes (or mimes, one might say) even such a conventional
ornamental showoff, or “pure dance,” part as that
in Pavillon. On the other hand, the awkward heaviness that Faun,
Sacre, and Jeux exhibited, and that was emphasized by their angular
precision, was not, I believe, an anticlassic innovation. It was
an effort to make the dance more positive, to make clearer still
the center of gravity of a movement, so that its extent, its force,
its direction, its elevation can be appreciated not incidentally
merely, but integrally as drama. He not only extended the plastic
range in dancing, but clarified it. And this is the way to give
meaning to dancing -- not secondhand literary meaning, but direct
meaning. Nijinsky’s latest intentions of “circular
movement” and the improvisational quality Tyl seems to have
had are probably a normal development of his sense of motion in
relation to a point of repose – a motion that grew more
animated and diverse as his instinct became more exercised. (An
evolution not wholly dissimilar can be followed in Miss Graham’s
work, for instance.) And I consider the following remark he made
to be indicative of the direction of his instinct: “Le grace,
le charme, le joli sont rangés tout autour du point central
qu’est le beau. C’est pour le beau que je travaille.”
I do not see anything in these pictures that would lead one to
suppose that Nijinsky’ subsequent insanity cast any premonitory
shadow on his phenomenally luminous dance intelligence.

In their stillness Nijinsky’s pictures have more vitality
than the dances they remind us of as we now see them on stage.
They remain to show us what dancing can be, and what the spectator
and the dancer each aspire to, and hold to be a fair standard
of art. I think they give the discouraged dance lover faith in
dancing as a serious human activity. As Mr. Van Vechten wrote
after seeing him in 1916: “His dancing has the unbroken
quality of music, the balance of a great painting, the meaning
of fine literature, and the emotion inherent in all these arts.”